Any variations that the abbreviation for the reporter may have. For example, Kentucky Reports can be cited variously as, “B. Mon.”, “Ky.(B.Mon.)”, “Mon.”, “Mon.B.”, or “Monroe, B.” We have nearly 1,000 of these so far.

The start and end dates for each series of each reporter.

The jurisdictions covered by each reporter.

Together, this information is vital for creating citators and for identifying what decision a citation actually refers to.

More information about the database can be found on its page here. We have used this database in production on CourtListener for years and we believe the collection of reporters is nearly complete. However, we do need help getting the start and end dates for each reporter series. If …

We at Free Law Project have been working towards our goals for a few years now, and as a result we’ve accumulated a bit of cruft. Today, we shed just a bit of it, as we simultaneously end one of our smaller projects and deprecate our list server.

The project we are ending is our PACER Drainage project. The idea of the project was to put pressure on PACER by having lots of people use their $15 fee waiver to download PACER content to the RECAP archive.

The main reason we’re ending this project is because PACER is vast, and we never got the kind of uptake we needed for this program to be successful. We knew that we’d never make a big impact on PACER unless thousands of people started using their fee waivers to download content, but we went ahead with this project anyway for two reasons. First, we wanted to be part of the effort last year to apply pressure to PACER, and second, we wanted to raise awareness about the PACER issue via a direct call to action.

While I don’t think we succeeded in applying the pressure we wanted (the AO …

Robert Ambrogi recently wrote an article about our new judicial database for his LawSites blog. In his article, he makes a few concrete observations about our judicial database, and I want to use these observations as a launching point to talk some more about what we have made, why it is useful, and what we are working on next.

Scalia’s end date was not set for his time on the Supreme Court, and his education data was not quite correct.

These kinds of observations are really important to us, and it shows that we still have work to do building and explaining our work.

On Sparseness

To the first observation about Robert Cordy, our response is that we’re building a database, not a more free-form wiki. Unlike the incredible work Ballotpedia is doing, which allows almost any kind of information, our work is focused on gathering specific facts about judges and appointing officials. This approach has pros and cons, and Robert is fair to point out that our data about this important judge is fairly sparse. He …

In this post I’ll be talking about the challenges that we overcame in order to efficiently generate these visualizations. If you like what you read here, you might want to vote (hint, hint) for Colin Starger’s talk at the Cali Conference.

In the Beginning…

A goal at the start was to create a system that could quickly generate these diagrams in response to a user’s request, without resorting to any kind of “please wait” mechanism such as a spinner () or any other tricks that might frustrate our users. This would turn out to be a very difficult goal beacuse of the nature of citation networks.

In a database like ours, the data is organized into tables, much like in an Excel …

If you are a user of Google Play Music, you can easily subscribe to our podcasts by searching for “Free Law Project”, “CourtListener”, or simply, “oral arguments”. Once you subscribe, the podcasts will download to your device if you use one, or will be playable via the website.

These podcasts contain all of the oral argument audio for a given court or for a search that you create. This means that in 2016, you can literally pipe the audio from the Supreme Court and Federal Circuit Courts directly to your pocket.

In honor of this announcement we’ve created a new page on our site that lists our existing, pre-made podcasts, explains how to make custom ones, and explains how to subscribe to them in Google Play Music or Stitcher Radio.

We hope you’ll enjoy these podcasts. Who doesn’t want the Supreme Court piped to their pocket?

Today we’re extremely proud and excited to be launching a comprehensive database of judges and the judiciary, to be linked to Courtlistener’s corpus of legal opinions authored by those judges. We hope that this database, its APIs, and its bulk data will become a valuable tool for attorneys and researchers across the country. This new database has been developed with support from the National Science Foundation and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, in conjunction with Elliott Ash of Princeton University and Bentley MacLeod of Columbia University.

Working on complex software with a lot of dependencies can be difficult, and over the years many people have struggled to install and configure all the complex components CourtListener requires. Our previous solution to this was to create and maintain the Free Law Virtual Machine, which allowed people to work in a VM with all the right software installed. Alas, keeping the VM maintained was a real burden and we weren’t the best at it. It fell into decay and without realizing it we informally stopped recommending people use it.

Today we have a new, more modern solution using Vagrant. We’re getting the last of the kinks out of the new system, but already a number of people are using it in their daily process. It has all of the dependencies installed and configured. Best of all, although your code will be running in a virtual machine like before, when you’re using this setup, you still get to use all of your favorite tools on your local machine. If you haven’t used Vagrant before, you’ll find it’s a rather magical experience.

If you’re a contributor to CourtListener it’s definitely worth checking this …

We here at Free Law Project are happy to announce the launch of our Supreme Court Citation Network tool. Created in collaboration with the SCOTUS Mapping Project at the University of Baltimore, the tool permits users to create citation networks that represent “lines of cases” in Supreme Court doctrine. With the tool, users can also visualize, analyze, and share the networks they create.

Consider the network above. It was created with the tool and embedded directly into this post. Similar to a YouTube video, you can interact with it, hovering on the nodes to see the full case name, or clicking them to open them in a new tab. Of course, you can also open the visualization in its own page, where you’ll find more detail and analysis.

The visualization leverages Supreme Court Database (Spaeth) to show a surprising fact about the recently departed Justice Scalia: He was a liberal on the Fourth Amendment. The map is anchored by two Scalia opinions in which the supposedly conservative justice sided with an accused marijuana criminal — Kyllo (protecting weed grower from warrantless thermal imaging search) and Jardines (protecting weed grower from warrantless dog sniffing search).

We want to share some quick statistics today. We we just completed running our citation parser across the entire CourtListener collection. If you follow our work, you’ll know that the purpose of the citation parser is to go through every opinion in CourtListener and identify every citation from one opinion to another (such as “410 U.S. 113“). Once identified, the parser looks up the citation and attempts to make a hyperlink between the opinions so that if you see a citation while reading, you can click it to go to the correct place.

As you can imagine, looking up every citation in every opinion in CourtListener can take some time, so we only run our citation finder when we need to. In this case:

This post is one with mixed news, so I’ll start with the good news, which is that version 3.0 of the CourtListener API is now available. It’s a huge improvement over versions 1 and 2:

It is now browsable. Go check it out. You can click around the API and peruse the data without doing any programming. At the top of every page there is a button that says Options. Click that button to see all the filtering and complexity that lies behind an API endpoint.

It can be sampled without authentication. Previously, if you wanted to use the API, you had to log in. No more. In the new version, you can sample the API and click around. If you want to use it programatically, you’ll still need to authenticate.

It conforms with the new CourtListener database. More on this in a moment, but the important part is that version 3 of the API supports Dockets, Opinion Clusters and Sub-Opinions, linking them neatly to Judges.

The search API supports Citation Searching. Our new Citation Search is a powerful feature that’s now available in the API.

One of the great new features that the new version of CourtListener provides is what we’re calling Citation Searching. Citation Searching lets you look at all the opinions that cite an opinion you’re interested in and then slice and dice them so that you only see the ones that are important to you.

For example, say you’re looking at Roe v. Wade and you want to analyze the cases that have cited it. In CourtListener, in the sidebar on the left, there’s a list of the opinions citing the one you’re looking at, in the section called “Cited By”. At the bottom of that section, there’s a link that says, “Full List of Cited Opinions”.

If you click that link, you’ll be taken back to the search results page, and you’ll see that your query is for cites:(108713). The number in there is the ID of Roe v. Wade that you can see in its URL. This is just standard CourtListener search syntax, so you can tweak it however you like.

While working on a soon-to-be-released feature of CourtListener, we needed to create “short form” case names for all the cases that we could. We’re happy to share that we’ve created about 1.8M short form case names, including complete coverage for all Supreme Court cases going back to 1947, when the Supreme Court
Database begins.

If you’re not familiar with the term, short form case names are the ones you might use in a later citation to an authority you’ve already discussed in a document. For example, the first time you mention a case you might say:

Kellogg Brown & Root Services, Inc. v. United States Ex Rel. Carter

But later references might just be:

Kellogg Brown at 22

The Blue Book doesn’t have a lot to say about this format, but does say the short form must make it, “clear to the reader…what is being referenced.” Also:

When using only one party name in a short form citation, use the name
of the first party, unless that party is a geographical or
governmental unit or other common litigant.

With these rules in mind, we made an algorithm that attempts to generate good short form …

It’s taken the better part of a year, but I’m thrilled to announce that a new and better version of CourtListener is live as of this moment. If you can’t tell the difference immediately, we see that as a good thing, since most of the enhancements are under the hood.

The most important changes in this version have to do with the database, which now supports a number of new features. Most importantly, legal opinions are no longer single entities. For example, in the past if we had the lead opinion, a dissent, and a concurrence, we had no choice but to put them all together and make them readable top to bottom on our site. That has been fine, but in our new system we introduce the concept of an Opinion Cluster, which consists of several “sub opinions”.

This will let us have links from a dissent to a concurrence, something we couldn’t do before. Or we can change the way the “sub-opinions” are displayed so that you can easily go straight to the dissent or the concurrence, without having to scroll endlessly. In a similar way, we are now introducing dockets, which will soon …

A quick announcement today to share that we’re making Free.law our new home and that we’re launching a new homepage to go with it. If you’re reading this post, you’re looking at the new site! Let us know what you think or if we can improve it somehow. For the most part, it’s a replica of our old site, but we’ve made a few improvements here and there. In general, the layout, typography, security, speed, and reliability should all be better.

In addition to the new homepage being live, we also updated our email, so you can now reach us at somebody@free.law.

We love preserving digital artifacts, so here’s a screenshot of the old site:

FreeLawProject.org, v1. You can also browse the old site at archive.org.

For the technically curious, this new site uses the Pelican Static Site Generator, and runs on the Amazon Web Services stack. This means that it will be incredibly fast no matter where you are in the world, it should never go down, and it allows us to secure the page behind HTTPS. If you want more details, you can find them in …

This new tool relies on our existing citation extractor, which extracts thousands of citations from opinions every day. As a result, these links are also able to handle alternate names for any reporter that we have encoded in our Reporters Database. For example, the United States Reports has historically also been abbreviated as “U.S.S.C.Rep.” or “USSCR”. Use either of these, and you’ll find that they also work without a hitch:

A fundamental assumption underlying our discourse about the activities
of reading, thinking, and speech is that individuals in our society
are guaranteed the freedom to form their thoughts and opinions in
privacy, free from intrusive oversight by governmental or private entities.

Cohen notes that, in the past, our right to read anonymously has been
protected by
libraries
and librarians. See, for
example, the American Library Association’s Freedom to
Read
statement, adopted in 1953. Our American experience has generally been
that one is able to walk into a public library, take almost any book off
the shelf, sit down, and read without ever identifying oneself or asking
anyone’s permission. Most libraries, as vigorous defenders of reader
privacy, only maintain information about which books you check out until
you return them and then they destroy any record connecting your
identity to the books checked out. It was, in 1996, the growing
prevalence of electronic dissemination of information and technologies
to monitor …

Update: We’ve moved our development conversation over to Slack. If you wish to join us there, please get in touch using our contact form.

Quick post today to share that by popular demand, we’ve created YAEL —
Yet Another Email List. Today’s list is one we should have made a while
back, and is for folks that work on the Juriscraper library. You can
find and add yourself to the list here:

In general, this will be a normal list where we’ll post any important
updates about Juriscraper, but this list will also get one special email
per day documenting the status of our 200+ court scrapers. Previously
this email was only sent privately to maintainers, but by making it
public, we’re hoping to encourage more people to identify and fix the
day to day problems that arise with so many scrapers.

Free Law Project is excited to announce that over the next several
months we will be collaborating with the University of Baltimore and
Assistant Professor of Law, Colin Starger, to build a web-based version
of his Supreme Court Mapping
Project, a
software-driven effort to visualize Supreme Court doctrine. Currently a
desktop software tool, the collaboration will move this functionality to
the web, incorporating it directly into Free Law Project’s
CourtListener platform.

Once incorporated into CourtListener, users will be able to create
visualizations of how different cases cite each other, including
plotting them against variables from the Supreme Court
Database such as whether the case had
a liberal or conservative outcome, and the minority/majority votes of
the justices. Using the CourtListener citation API, Colin and his
partner Darren Kumasawa have done a lot of work in this area already,
laying a great foundation for this project.

The current design

We hope that within a few months our new service will go live, and that
teachers, librarians, and researchers will be able to create great new
visualizations of Supreme Court doctrine. If you’ve been watching Colin
and Darren’s work over on …

Special Issue of Artificial Intelligence and Law in Honor of
Carole Hafner: call for papers

Earlier this year, Carole Hafner, a key figure in the origin and
development of AI and Law, died. A tribute to Carole can be found
at http://www.iaail.org/?q=page/memorials. A special issue
of Artificial Intelligence and Law (which she co-founded) will be
published in 2016, focusing on Carole’s main research topics:
semantic retrieval and the procedural, temporal and teleological
aspects of reasoning with legal cases.

In her long academic career, Carole Hafner made contributions in a
number of areas of AI and Law. Her 1978 Ph.D. dissertation was a
pioneering effort in semantic information retrieval of legal cases;
ahead of its time, it supplied what would now be called ontologies for
describing case law domains and cases, a retrieval language, and
methods for retrieving, from a corpus of a hundred cases, cases
providing: examples of which a specified concept is (or is not) true,
criteria for knowing that the concept does (or does not) hold, or the
consequences of the presence or absence of the concept in a particular
case. Today, developments in …